Nike’s New App Shows Designers What Materials Are Most Sustainable

Making, a new app from Nike, gives designers access to six years of research on materials sustainability. Image: Nike

Some time ago, a team of employees at Nike was given a special project: Cataloging the 75,000-some items found in the company’s vast materials library and giving them each a score based on their environmental impact and long-term sustainability. No one had really done anything like it before, and it ultimately took the team six years to complete. Now, you can flick through their findings on your iPhone.

The fruit of all that labor was something called the Materials Sustainability Index, or MSI, a “cradle-to-gate index” of everything and anything that could conceivably go into making a windbreaker or a pair of shoes. Making, as the new app is called, wraps the apparel-related entries of that massive dataset up in a simple, finger-friendly package.

Open it up and you’re greeted with a colorful column of options. In a nice UI flourish, the whole thing wobbles gelatinously as you scroll through. Each color lets you view the materials ranked by different criteria. You can see how they stack up based on energy use, water consumption, and recyclability, to name a few. Down, silk, and cotton are score well, generally speaking. Spandex, if the app is to be trusted, should be avoided at all costs.

Image:Nike

Nike has been pushing sustainability within its own product lines for years, introducing waste-reducing technologies like Flyknit and working towards a “closed-loop” business model in which all of its offerings are made with 100 percent recyclable materials. But realizing that its own products can only have so great an impact, the company’s also been exploring how it might affect change throughout the industry. Part of that comes with projects like the MSI, which Nike submitted to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an international group of apparel and footwear companies, for industry-wide use. After bringing in an independent committee to review the Nike team’s methodology and analysis, the coalition made the index available online. It offers a nice web tool for digging through the data, which you can find here.

But the new app represents a slightly different approach to solving the problem–basically, trying to instill a concern for sustainability directly in the next generation of designers. As Hannah Jones, Nike’s VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation points out, many environmentally oriented efforts end up concerning themselves with production and manufacturing. With Making, Jones says, “we decided to go back upstream and really try to impact the designer.”

The company worked with a group of students from the London College of Fashion to prototype the app, trying to figure out how to most effectively present the invaluable but admittedly granular data. “What you want to do is put tools in the hands of designers that are bespoke to their means at the moment of truth, which is the moment of design,” Jones explains. “The app is really tailored to help them make real-time predictive choices around the materials they use.”

Of course, young designers don’t have Nike’s vast reserves of textiles at their fingertips, and it can be hard to see how useful it will actually be for them to know that ramie uses slightly less water than lyocell. Still, it’s hard to fault the project’s premise. Even if it’s more useful as a reminder than an actual reference, any tool that encourages designers to think of sustainability not just as a fashionable approach or icing on a concept’s cake but rather as a fundamental aspect of their job is probably a good thing.

Jones hopes that Making will prompt designers to dive deeper into the MSI on the web, and to think about how that data, which is available with an open source license, might be mixed, mashed-up or put to use in other ways. But ultimately, she says, the app’s about “helping the designer understand that every choice they make–every moment they’re picking up their pen to design a product–can actually have a massive ripple effect on the downstream side of things.” Every product carves its own path to market, but they all start at a delta.